Other than dedicated media watchers, readers in the United States will be at best only dimly aware of the “phone-hacking” scandal surrounding the News of the World, the UK Sunday tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International, and said to be the most widely read newspaper in the English-speaking world.
Well, you’ll be hearing a bit more about it over the next few days, as it’s been announced that the paper – known colloquially as the “News of the Screws” on account of its predilection for reporting on sex scandals involving politicians and celebrities – will close after this Sunday’s edition is published.
The hacking scandal has dogged the paper for years. In 2007 a reporter and private investigator were jailed for hacking into the voicemail messages of aides to Prince William (the one who just got married). But that was just the beginning. A steady drip of hacking revelations continued to plague the NoW; News International paid out damages to several victims including actress Sienna Miller and British politicians and sports personalities, and Andy Coulson who was editor of the NoW at the time the original offenses were committed, was forced to resign his position as communications director for Prime Minister David Cameron. (For those interested there’s a Q&A on the affair here, and massive coverage on all UK news sites.)
Things came to a head in the last couple of days with revelations that the jailed private investigator had also hacked the voicemail of a murdered schoolgirl – while police were still searching for her, and before it was known she was dead. The final straw came this morning when it emerged that families of British soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan had likely also been victims of hacking.
Nice summary. I’d been hearing bits and pieces of this, but it’s nice to see it in one place.
I am appalled by two circumstances within this story. One is that a newspaper on the order of a century and a half old, which once had Winston Churchill as a correspondent, is being shuttered because of something like this. The other is that someone could hack the voicemail of a dead soldier or a little girl who was a crime victim. I’m not an expert on British tabloids and whether they hack people’s phones, and how often. I can guess, however, that there’s a difference (or there should be) between hacking the phone of Amy Winehouse or Posh Spice, and the phone belonging to the sister or wife of a soldier dead in Afghanistan, or a little girl who’s missing and perhaps dead. In the latter case the hackers somehow deleted the voicemails stored on the phone, while the child was still missing; the deletion briefly gave everyone hope she was alive, because who else would delete her messages?
My only quibble is with closing the paper itself. The institution didn’t do anything wrong; the scum working there should be in prison (and apparently some are on their way).
“I can guess, however, that there’s a difference (or there should be) between hacking the phone of Amy Winehouse or Posh Spice, and the phone belonging to the sister or wife of a soldier dead in Afghanistan, or a little girl who’s missing and perhaps dead.”
You’re absolutely right David. The Guardian/BBC were banging on about this for years, but outside the media and Labour MPs no-one was interested when it was just celebrities having their phones hacked – rightly or wrongly the British public isn’t inclined to sympathise with their ‘right to privacy’. However, there was a big change in the last couple of days, when it emerged that the victims of hacking included the murdered schoolgirl (Milly Dowler), soldiers’ families, and also families of the July 2005 London bombings.
My point is that when the Guardian/BBC began this campaign, they had no idea that they would turn up the revelations of the last couple of days. They kept battering away in the hope that something would turn up that would turn public opinion against NoW and Murdoch. They eventually got lucky, and it’s right and proper that those activities were uncovered. But don’t make the mistake of thinking the Guardian/BBC’s motives were noble.
“But don’t make the mistake of thinking the Guardian/BBC’s motives were noble.”
That may or may not be true, but at some point it’s no longer relevant. I kept saying during the O.J. trial that even if Mark Fuhrman was a racist, he still might have found the famous bloody glove at O.J.’s house. Fuhrman being a racist didn’t assure us Simpson was innocent; his motivation may very well have been less than pure, but it didn’t determine Simpson’s guilt.
Same thing here. Whatever the motives of the Guardian, hacking a crime victim’s phone, or that of the family of a dead soldier, is beyond the pale. If you think that this is a victory for Britain’s MSM, which has a liberal media bias similar to ours, then the best solution, from my point of view, is to encourage better conservative journalism in Britain. Frankly, if I were British I’d be leading the charge (verbally anyway) to have these cretins arrested and prosecuted for the crimes they committed. If we’re going to try and hold other people to standards of behavior, we have to at least make the attempt to observe them ourselves…and by any objective standard this doesn’t cut it.
Yes, I understand there’s an anti-Murdoch sentiment in Britain and elsewhere (we get it here too) but this is ridiculous. If someone on our side of the Atlantic had done this (say from the NYT–only reason that’s unbelievable is because the crime here is too creative) we’d be screaming for blood and ripping them to shreds. I’m not saying it should happen to conservatives, or even all the things Murdoch owns, but this paper is dead, and the people that work there (at least the ones involved in this) deserve everything they get.
“The sum working there should be on prison” The “Scum” as you call them have not worked at the News of the World for some years. The 200 journalists who face dismissal joined the paper long after the alleged events took place. I use the the term allegedly as no-one has been charged with these offences as yet.
Where do you get the idea that the UK Main Stream Media is “Liberal” LOL. Try telling staff at the Mail, the Telegraph, or the Express that.
“…the scum working there should be in prison….”
No, no, David, it’s all a plot of the “anti-Murdoch alliance.”
Mr. Murdoch has one unit of his vast news company that does something illegal and he does an honorable thing. He recognizes the problem and closes the offending unit. There is no evidence that Mr. Murdoch knew of, or condoned this behavior.
If Mr. Obama were as honorable as Mr. Murdoch he would shut down the ATF. In the ATF illegal activity people were murdered and incompetent leadership has bee promoted. What is wrong with this picture?
I just can’t picture Rupert Murdoch as a “man of honour”. Much more likely, he and his son felt that the scandal over the News of the World would affect their chances of getting full control of the BSkyB satellite broadcaster, and decided to cut their losses. The losers are not they and their cronies, but the staff and journalists, who are suddenly thrown out of work over something a different set of people were doing years ago.
It is also widely speculated that the Sun newspaper, which Murdoch also owns, will start a Sunday edition. The domain name sunonsunday.co.uk was registered on the 5th of July. (Registrant: Mediaspring; Registrant type: UK Individual; Registrant’s address: The registrant is a non-trading individual who has opted to have their address omitted from the WHOIS service.)
Make no mistake if Murdoch didn;t think the brand was damaged beyond repair (by his own senior staff and under some level of knowledge) and he didn’t have the merger on the table, he would have kept it running. He and his staff broke the law and violated privacy for profit. They got caught. Tough nuts!
I dont know if you Guys would be interested in this but, speaking from the UK side of the pond this is one perspective, one I happen to subscribe to, of what happened and why.
http://autonomousmind.wordpress.com/2011/07/07/the-real-reason-for-the-guardian-bbc-assault-on-news-international/
Thanks for that link, I’m on that side of the pond too.
Good article.
Thanks for the link.
The glee with which Lefties here in Australia are attacking our own News-affiliated journos (such as Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt) even though the only thread is that they work for newspapers (Daily Tele and Herald Sun) which are owned by the same dude who owns the NOTW tells me that a lot of the momentum was inspired by a more generalised “Get Murdoch & Everyone Who Takes His Coin” vendetta than by anything else.
And in saying “Lefties,” I’m including our State broadcaster the ABC. Their’s, too, seems much more a generalised “Get Murdoch!” mission than anything else. But, that the BBC’s Antipodean cousin would support & adopt her tactics was always to be expected. Sigh.
BTW, Tim Blair writes:
UK Times columnist Giles Coren summarises the feelings of many News staffers: “Wow. Abused to my face in the butcher’s for working for a (great) paper that is owned by a man who also owns a bad one. Dark days.”
http://twitter.com/gilescoren/status/88630166611435520
via
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/news_of_the_world_now_world_news/
Actually this is a very serious matter.
There are 2 illegal acts going on
1/ Phone hacking, breaking passwords to access the targets voice mail
2/ Phone tapping, listening in to live calls and/or text messages.
To do these activities these days you need very sophisticated equipment which is illegal to import into the UK, USA and most other countries.
While the publicity in the UK has been about celebrities–Scotland Yard has evidence of widespread tapping and hacking of police, financial industries, politicians and national security members private cell phone accounts and for industrial espionage and insider trading.
This is a very serious matter indeed.
The question is who is supplying this very sophisticated, and expensive, eavesdropping equipment?
How rampant is this activity in the USA in the same sectors? –police, industrial and other espionage, financial industries, investment etc.
Crooks, spies, insider traders, extortionist and blackmailers are all, apparently, involved in this activity in the UK and the US.
This is a very serious matter.
“To do these activities these days you need very sophisticated equipment…”
Unless the owner of the phone(s) in question was lazy about setting a robust security code. Lots of people don’t even bother to change it from the factory defaults (and there are lists of those freely available on the internet).
I think you overestimate the level of technical expertise which would have been required here. Tapping in commonly-used strings (0000, 1234, etc) when you’re diverted to voicemail, and in so doing getting access to the account, requires huge amounts of moral corruption, but not very much skillz.
By all accounts, the investigators hired by the News of the World used default and common passwords (actually 4-digit PINs) to access voicemail accounts. Some UK mobile operators don’t impose any security on voicemail at all. It’s absurdly easy to “hack” (if it can even be called that). You don’t need anything more sophisticated than a phone and the knowledge that the default is usually “1234”.
And that’s why it’s ridiculous to assume that the NOTW was the only paper doing it.
There was a scandal some years ago when the Prince of Wales’s cellphone was tapped, but that was in the days of analogue phones when any relatively simple radio scanner could do the job. Again, not expensive, not difficult.
This is not the first time the Guardian (with the help of its friends in the BBC) has set out on a concerted campaign of attack against a rival firm. In the 1980s, it set out to convince the country that “Tiny” Rowland, then proprietor of the Observer, was unfit to own a national newspaper, portraying him as interfering in editorial content to promote the interests of his business, Lonrho. In truth, this was probably less true of Rowland than of any other proprietor at the time, such as Murdoch, Robert Maxwell of the Mirror Group, or Conrad Black of the Telegraph (indeed, it can be shown that Rowland was often frustrated by the paper’s refusal to suppress stories that might be bad for Lonrho). But, it later turned out, the Guardian wanted the Observer for itself (and ultimately got it), so he was in its sights. And to this day, Rowland is a byword for editorial interference.
Despite being the least-read of all Britain’s national papers (there’s some doubt as to whether it would even be a viable business without its virtual monopoly on state-sector job advertising) The Guardian is the media insiders’ favourite, and its power to insert ideas into the British media “narrative”, particularly with the help of the joined-at-the-hip BBC, is immense. Somewhat ironic, given the constant accusations that News Corp. is “too powerful”.
That it should engage in this sort of behaviour is one thing. Newspaper proprietors are grown men, not dead 13-year-olds, and should be able to defend themselves against their rivals’ attacks. That it should do so while, in true Leftist fashion, claiming the moral high-ground is quite another.
Again — making this a left vs right issue is missing the point.
The same technology is being used to tap cell calls for police, financial industries, politicians and national security members private cell phone accounts and for industrial espionage and insider trading.
There is evidence that the PIs and reporters involved paid the police for information and to hush up any investigation.
The key is to seize the sophisticated tapping equipment involved and track it to the source–which may be a foreign government agency.
You cannot buy this equipment in the US, NSA the FBI and other agencies have it–but you cannot by it on 42 Street in NYC and it costs up to $ 1 million and requires classified training to use it effectively.
In the old days of analogue cell phones it was fairly simple
–with the current digital cell networks it is a whole different ball game and you need very expensive, sophisticated equipment.
News Corp is trying to change the topic by the drastic act of killing News of the World in their case
This story is not going to go away anytime soon–nor should it.
Just today James Murdoch admitted to perjury before the UK Parliament.
News Corp is just the tip of the iceberg.
“You cannot buy this equipment in the US, NSA the FBI and other agencies have it–but you cannot by it on 42 Street in NYC and it costs up to $ 1 million and requires classified training…”
Again, read the two responses above. I think you are grossly overestimating the sophistication of the cell phone message “hacking” which took place (which isn’t even “hacking” in the way most people think of it but was closer to “social engineering” in that it was taking advantage of the fact that a lot of people are naive &/or stupidly lazy when it comes to setting passwords and such).
This is not James Bond or Puzzle Palace stuff. Teenagers do it. Disgruntled exes do it. Suspicious wives do it. And apparently “investigative reporters” sans scruples do it. ~shrugs~
The Guardian is an amazing paper for the way it is self-congratulatory about its desperate flailing for relevance and to preserve its place in media.
The link below every NOTW story was “read how the Guardian broke this”.
This is also the only foreign paper I saw participate in the crowd-sourced review of the Palin emails, which it then trumpeted as an achievement in journalism. Yes, duping readers into providing free service, reading the mundane details of someone who is currently outside the political sphere of a foreign country is certainly groundbreaking, just in the field of frothy-mouthed uselessness.